From Jack Thompson’s new temper tantrum at Take Two:
I want to bring to your attention the fact that at www.rockstargames.com anyone of any age can order Manhunt 2 and receive it, with no age verification whatsoever. Asking a 14-year-old if he’s 17 is not age verification, now is it?
How the hell is this guy a lawyer? Not only is that legal age verification in the United States (and, in fact, has been by precedent since the 1960s, when the issue was first tested by adult telephone services,) but also the Take 2 site only takes credit cards - which are themselves acceptable forms of age verification in the US since the early 1970s. Either the Florida Bar is obscenely easy, or Jacky Boy has been taking some anti-memory pills. That he should send that phrase on to the FTC and activist groups is so deeply ignorant of the law that it’s almost embarrassing to know who Jack is.
Jack, I write family-friendly game titles for a living, including family licenses from children’s cartoons. I want you out of my industry. You do far more damage than you prevent. Get it through your head: you’re a poor lawyer, a poor activist and a poor excuse for an adult living in a representative democracy. Stop flogging the bear: you may be a media whore, but the bear’s gonna turn around and bite you, soon enough.
And by bear, I mean “barratry.” Since you don’t seem to understand the law, Jack, please look it up (the various news blogs covering this are unfortunately referring to the COPPA decision; the COPA decision I just linked is far more germane.)
I greatly hope that the Take 2 lawyers will take barratry into consideration. This is the clearest case of abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in years, and that’d put a hell of a lot of weight behind the disbarment we all so desperately want to see.
So, I handed over some webspace to a guy on IRC who was converting books from Project Gutenberg for use with the bookreader in MoonShell for the Nintendo DS. He was trying to share a few books I recognized and they’re all legal, and his webspace was fail, so I figured I’d be goodbear and share.
Lo and behold, I take a look at the space I gave him - http://moonbooks.stonecypher.net/ - a few weeks later. He’s already got 150+ books up. Very rarely am I as happy with someone to whom I give resources as I am this time. This is a great example of shared resources being put to very good use. In particular, Brandon asked me what authors I liked, and when I name-dropped Ambrose Bierce, he went and converted what appears to be everything Bierce ever wrote, including a personal favorite called “Write it Right.”
Bravo. Makes me wonder who else I should be helping out, and I gave out another account today. We’ll see if it’s also put to good use.
It’s been a good year for holy-crap technologies. This one - an MIT tool called ASSIST - boggles my mind, and it’s given me some seriously woot ideas. I’m filing it under Nintendo DS because, even though it’s not a game, that’s just the ideal platform for a better-developed such tool.
The YouTube video is short, but there’s a longer one at the main page.
There’s a point at which one begins to wonder how they can take themselves seriously when they claim their channel is all about keeping it calm. It’s gotten quite sad. Mellow’s just a hangout for warezers, pirates and troublemakers, anymore. They cause trouble in the real channel, then they go to #mellow and behave, so they can convince themselves they’re really okay guys, and that it’s just the other channel’s fault that they’re trolling.
Sadly, I begin to worry that they’ve gotten so caught up in their drama and lies that they won’t ever admit to themselves the damage they’ve done, and that the way the split will end is when the DS is over. We’d lose half a dozen good developers that way.
It’d be nice if they’d grow up, get over the drama and come back. Joat, I’m looking straight at you.
Lots of blogs aggregate my blog, and most of them - surprisingly, even the homebrew scene aggregators - haven’t set this yet. So, let me just spread the love: the Wii will be released November 19, 2006 at a price of $250. Many details were given. Some games will use the DS as a controller, just as the GameCube used the GBA as a controller (examples from the past include Donkey Kong Country 3, and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, which actually required a GBA for a controller.) Nostalgic NES games will be $5, SNES for $10, and N64 for $15.
There’ve been a lot of good media clips lately. This one, well, it’s pretty good. Some of the lead-in visual gags are a bit tired, but they’ve also got several really good, really inobvious visual gags, so give them the benefit of the doubt.
Some movies. There are three, so I’m hiding them behind the more button. Don’t mind the name, or the black-and-whiteness; you want to see these. Read the rest of this entry »
For those who haven’t noticed, the dev channels from efnet for Nintendo hardware have moved to irc.blitzed.net . Affected are #dsdev, #gbadev, and #wiidev.
I’ve got a potential buyer for my PC and Nintendo DS Sudoku clients, so I’ve been working on them fairly exclusively. I’m kind of hoping to have news about them soon, because in particular the PC client has a bunch of fairly odd new features which I am quite proud of. But, first I have to get them sold.
And it was homebrew that pulled it off (see also,) based on the stack I made happen for the DS. PS: I love taking credit for other people’s work and money based on nothing more than being a highly successful loudmouth. Word to Big Bird. PPS: PSP: your time is now. Make your peace.
Huhuhuh. Bumped into this thread on Neogaf while browsing around Wired blogs. Amusingly and amazingly, they managed to miss maybe the best training game, which is a shame, because Princess Peach looks like she’s just about ready for it in that picture.
I haven’t written a roguelike in a long, long time. Last time, I used the traditional light-per-room model for lighting from the original Rogue; these days, I don’t find that at all satisfactory. It’s time for a proper shadowcaster. Read the rest of this entry »
That’s right, I’ve got a polling toy that takes user votes. As a result, I’m going to set up a new poll. What classic game do you most strongly want to see ported to the DS? Read the rest of this entry »
I’m working on a field-of-vision implementation for Southgate at the moment, which is both very fast and highly accurate. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a point at which one begins to wonder how they can take themselves seriously when they claim their channel is all about keeping it calm. It’s gotten quite sad. Mellow’s just a hangout for warezers, pirates and troublemakers, anymore. They cause trouble in the real channel, then they go to #mellow and behave, so they can convince themselves they’re really okay guys, and that it’s just the other channel’s fault that they’re trolling.